Resolve the issue if your phone is not detecting Router’s WiFi

Few days ago I faced a strange problem on one of my little old mobile phone manufactured by Sony Ericsson. It was not detecting my WiFi router’s SSID. Whenever I scanned for available Wifi networks, the required Wifi name was not showing up in the list. It was really a strange problem. On my other devices, iPhone 4s, Samsung Galaxy S3, my laptops, MacBook Pro 13″ and ProBook windows 8, I was not getting any such problem.

Before finding the exact reason behind this issue, I tried many workarounds. I even reset my phone to factory settings, reset the router but all in vain. The phone was successfully detecting the signals of other WiFi routers which were transmitting the signals around my home.

Finally I found it was the wireless channel which was the culprit. When you open the settings page of any router, you’ll find the different options under Wireless. The names and options’ placement may vary from router to router. So it is better to consult the documentations of your router for the required information. I mostly use routers manufactured by TP-Link due to two reason. One, these are easily available in our area and secondly they are little cheaper than any other brands.

When you open the Wireless settings page, you’d see Channel. The Channel determines which operating frequency the router will use to transmit the data. If you see any problem in connecting with the router or any issue with data transfer, it is always recommended to change the Wireless Channel number before looking for any other solutions.

So, when this Channel option was set to “Automatic“, my phone didn’t recognise the router’s SSID. But when I set it to any other number manually, the phone could see the router. Then I tried different channels and found that if the channel is above 9 or below 3, the phone was unable to detect the Wireless signals but if the channel is between 3 to 9, there was no problem in connectivity.

I don’t know what’s the exact science behind it. But I think a little older phone models support few channels than the newer ones. In other words, the older devices support less operating frequencies than the newer ones.

So if you have a phone which is not detecting/connecting with the router but it can scan other routers, first change the channel manually to any other number before looking for more solutions.

I really spent a lot of time to find the exact cause, but I don’t want you to do the same. That’s why I am sharing this little tip today.

Author: A. Usman

Comments

It worked for me…thank you for taking the time to share. I changed the channel to 6 on the on the 2.4GHz band. My mobile is new not old and was the only item we own not to show up our wireless connection before we made the change.

I have the same problem in my HUAWEI mate 8, but I always had my router on channel 1, and my phone detected my WiFi perfectly since I got it two weeks ago. But it stoped detecting it all of a sudden! I don’t know what to do.

I faced the same problem that my Android phone was not detecting my owm WiFi, but, it detected other’s. I had tried many other methods viz., resetting the phone etc., without any success. Tried your solution by manually selecting the channel instead of ” automatic.”
It instantly worked. Thanks a million.

Thanks a lot! My phone used to work perfectly fine on my wifi, till one day chaos struck. Dunno what happened, started connecting disconnecting a lot and not recognising the network for long stretches of time. Your solution worked!

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